Inktober 2017 – Day Seven

Inktober 2017

So Day 7, the Shadow. I’m also twisting this as well, to make it a little different to what it actually says. The Burning Man will make a comeback…today. I know it’s been a few days but it makes sense okay.

Day 7, The Shadow

The one who starts it all, will have a dramatic opening scene… which I haven’t thought up yet. However, today’s theme made sense for a awesome last scene alive. With a menacing shadow around him (rip my fine liners).

Since I had a serious lack of male eye reference images I went on a hunt around Pinterest to find just that. I found out that Pinterest also has a serious lack of this as well. But when there’s a will there’s a way… aka Eddie Redmayne.. I found a good image to use, so I used his, it had the expression I wanted and the wide eye effect (Link below) I also found a good image of the shadowing I would want in my picture (Link below).

So now I had the images I just had to combine the two to create what I wanted (I will create a blog post at some point after Inktober to explain how I combine references).

The Drawing

Since I love drawing eyes, replicating the image didn’t take too long, thankfully. However, I didn’t quite get the pupils right, which was rather annoying. But like I say with other hiccups I do in the Inktober Drawings, I can rework into them at some point, which is what art is all about.

After the initial sketch was done, I used a fine liner to add in the initial cross hatching. Taking care to replicate directionality of the shapes within the face, which in my opinion is THE most important part of the shading (HaB_Art Tip#2 right there)

Finally I then added in the shading of The shadow, which was the theme today. I just replicated how the reference image had placed the shading, and did the same for my image, factoring proportion and lighting.

I seriously missed and contemplated using charcoal in this one. But because the theme is INKtober, I really didn’t want to stray too far from the point of it all. The expressionist inside me cried..

To improve this more I would’ve added more darker shadows around the nose on the left side, and filled the entire page… But for the sake of the life of my fine liner, and the life of Inktober, I couldn’t do it. But I shall in the rework.